[jrumbut]

Yeah, figuring out what you've really been hired to do is so important to happiness.

We all have our own idea of what excellence in software engineering looks like, but sometimes we're actually working as chairsitters, other times we're email account managers, sometimes we were only hired so our name/expertise/certifications can be listed on the "About Us" page.

Most of us would say an engineer can still be excellent with a flexible start time, but a chair sitter absolutely can't have that. However it would be fair for a chair sitter to get on the clock time to devote to upstream open source projects or to experiment with new database systems that might be useful for scaling.

[bamboozled]

I hear you, but don't see the parallels.

I'm talking about meeting attendance being important not just "chair sitting". It's important as a senior engineer to contribute to meetings for planning, setting direction, performance reviews etc. Which is what I'm doing in these meetings.

At one stage I was busy with projects and I'd refuse to attend the late night meetings, because I was busy, I thought just coding was what was important. Then I started to attend the meetings, wake up at 6am and work again. But that's when I realized that, the waking up early and working wasn't what they wanted from me , they wanted me to contribute to the meetings.

So now I reserve myself more for the important meetings task.